ambivalence

It’s been exactly a year since the passing of my roommate of 3 years and friend of 15 years. We were never really close, but I felt her presence in major turning points of my life. We grew up in the same condominium grounds and entered the same primary and secondary school. I even followed her to Seattle just a few years after she enrolled in UW, and lived with her under the persuasion of her mother. She was like the elder sister I never had, and an academic role model who excelled in all areas, socially and everything else. She was an alluring beauty. She was close to perfection.

The phone call I received from my mother in October last year changed everything. My ears have never heard anything so foreign and my brains could not register the news. Until now, I don’t think I accepted the fact that she’s truly gone, because somehow I feel that she’s still alive out there somewhere. Or maybe I’m just in denial that someone who was here for as long as I can remember can suddenly vanish from the surface of this planet.

With the idea of death following me around, sometimes all problems become so frivolous and life too feels ever so insignificant. So what if I solve all my problems? I’ll never get out alive anyway. Maybe it is this harsh reality that instills in me a strong sense of belonging to life itself, makes me embrace living to the fullest and hold on to life like it is the last straw on earth. Because one day I’ll see my last sunrise.

When I was just a child, I used to think the world revolved around me, and that I was the lead character in that world. (But of course, now I know better.) Being the sheltered child I was, I guess it was inevitable that I grew ignorant to worldly things and started dwelling with the abstract, or perhaps one can easily pass that off as day-dreaming. And like any other inquisitive minds, I wondered about life and its purpose. And just like any other man that ever walked the earth, I am nowhere close to the answer.

A topic that intrigues me ceaselessly is ‘time’. Isn’t it amazing how “we can never step into the same river twice” (Plato), and that we can only experience one direction a moment at any one time? As intangible as it is orderly, time is just like any other remarkable product of nature, confounding us by the very necessity of its existence. It provides an additional depth to our 3-dimensional world and bestow us with a point of reference to our lives, acting as the marker to the beginning, the end, and everything in between. As time brings forth abundant opportunities to those who wait, it robs them off their lives and everything that they attained. Ever since I became aware of this cruel fact, I have always thought that time is a merciless creature that destroy mankind slowly but surely. And I cannot seem to get over the fact that our fleeting lives adds up to only an insignificant percentage of the present age of the planet, not to mention the whole baffling universe.